restaurant management

It’s About People

In a stellar restaurant the separation from good to great is primarily created through the ability to cultivate a team of intellectually invested people who have a common goal. A goal to provide hospitality in a way that delights their guests. This goal applies to all hospitality businesses, it can apply to a small mom and pop hamburger shop and to a five star restaurant, to a Surfer Hostel and a Luxury Resort. The principles are the core, the facilities are the tools to deliver.

When an establishment has a clear set of goals, what it wants to deliver, what is the specialty, what the public will understand it to be, and how the team can stay within these parameters, finding the right people to take part will be easier. Once they are part of the team and allowed to create and deliver, there may be coaching moments to keep them on the path to deliver the goals, but they will more often push the project further than need coaching.

Its a win win.

This is not a trick, it is a plan. One that delivers the autonomy and patience to the team members to pursue an area of interest to them for profit and enjoyment. This is the idea. Creating the opportunity for someone to join the team who is doing what they love as their occupation.

This is a job for someone who has vision, belief, and the ability to take a well intentioned leap of faith. We are not cherry picking ripe figs from the branches of a tree that grew in our backyard without any care. We are cultivating, watering, pruning, and enabling these team members to blossom and grow into their potential. When they do, they will benefit, our guests will benefit, and the business will benefit. Without all three, how successful are we?

The architecture of your team, is your responsibility, it is the most challenging and most rewarding part of building these unique establishments. To my teams, I look forward to the big steps in front of us as we all grow, and deliver experiences that delight our guests along the way.

Great Restaurants Thrive on Cultural Diversity

Spiro Pappadopoulos

To say that I have been fortunate to be part of several great restaurant teams would be an understatement. Diversity was a characteristic of all of them. Restaurants are commonly raved about for their food, decor, location, and drinks. What truly sets apart the great from the good is the people. The team that delivers the experience is what the architects of the best restaurants spend the most time focused on.

The more diverse the team, the more likely that future stars, great ideas, and ability to overcome obstacles is present.

Diversity is fun. — Diversity means a new perspective for everything.

Innovation, stability, creativity, and future leaders are born of diverse teams.

I spend a lot of time working on team building, looking for greatness, weeding out bad seeds. All these activities are done in the name of trying to create depth and a pathway for people to advance. When I examined the best teams I have been a part of I noticed that the stars of our organizations today were frequently someone who joined us from a disparate background. They were a source of diversity, and brought a fresh perspective. Now they are a leader, and an integral part of who we are. A restaurant is the product of the people who are working there today, no more, no less.

Diversity can help you achieve higher highs, but it also helps you avoid pitfalls. This concept is simple in theory as Seth Godin wrote about a little while back:

About half of all the bananas consumed worldwide come from the same tree.

Not the same type of tree. The very same tree. The Cavendish, which has no seeds, is propagated by grafting or cloning. Which means that they’re all identical. If you’re a mass marketer, pushing everyone to expect and like the very same thing, a thing with no variation and little surprise, this is good news indeed.

Until, of course, a fungus comes along and wipes out the entire monoculture.

It’s tempting to want all your bananas to be the same. To have all your employees be clones of one another, your products to be indistinguishable commodities, each conforming to the dominant narrative of the day.

But variation brings resilience and innovation and the chance to make a difference.

What is Diversity?

We typically think about racial diversity as it is a dominant theme in our culture and news these days. But diversity in it’s full sense comes in many forms. For an intellectual, case study based read on the ways that diversity helps an organization; make sure you have read The Medici Effect. For many it is the definitive book on these topics. Frans Johansson, the author, even has some references to the success of diversity in restaurants. Here is his take on diversity:

Cultural diversity does not only imply geographically separated cultures. It can also include ethnic, class, professional, or organizational cultures. The mere fact that an individual is different from most people around him promotes more open and divergent, perhaps even rebellious, thinking in that person. Such a person is more prone to question traditions, rules, and boundaries—and to search for answers where others may not think to. ― Frans Johansson, Medici Effect: What You Can Learn from Elephants and Epidemics

Think about your restaurant, how diverse a group is there, what can you do to increase diversity?

Innovation and greater success are there for you if you can.

Tip: Consistently Communicate with Customers

Spiro Pappadopoulos

Marketing a restaurant is a game of consistency, you can’t post/email thirty two things in the next 15 minutes and then take two months off. You know that. Yet it is still likely the case that you find yourself with gaps in your communications, lapses in the connection with your customers that helps drive business through your door. What you need is a plan, a system that helps you simplify, and I have one for you.

See What I do on Instagram and Twitter by following @spirocks on both.

Restaurant Marketing Simplification System:

First you need a base that you control, a place where you can guarantee the rules won’t change and affect all the work you have put in. That is your website/blog, and I spelled out the reasons here: ( Don’t Just Rent Your Friends ) If your restaurant website does not have a blog section, you should make that project number 1.

Create a Blog on your website: Your blog is going to be the place where you create the content that is spread throughout your social networks and email lists.
Create a Mailchimp Account. Great news; they are free up to 2000 contacts so you can try this out with no risk. Mailchimp allows you to send RSS campaigns, which means that once you publish a blog post you have Mailchimp automatically create an email from it and email it out when you want, like say 10am on Friday. That’s it, email campaign done.
Decide the frequency with which you wish to contact your email list. Once you have that plan, all you need to do is create a post before the date and time (give it an hour early) you set in Mailchimp and you are done. Most people find creating a blog post a less cumbersome process than creating an email and best of all you kill two birds with one stone.
Social Network integration via Mailchimp allows you to connect your restaurant social accounts and post to them at the same time.

So there you have it a simple way to create great content once, on a platform you control, and get it distributed free to everywhere it needs to be.

How frequently to post to your social networks:

In addition to the above, I suggest having a plan for social media only posts, as you should post to them more frequently than you email. So say you have a new special every Tuesday, share a picture of that with a simple one line description.

One great place to do this is through instagram, where you can take a photo of a special appetizer for example and share it to not only instagram, but also facebook, twitter, flickr, and tumblr all at the same time. Maybe I will write another post on that if you are interested.

Got any tips on how you streamline your restaurant’s online marketing? I would love to hear.